Rachel, First and foremost, thank you. You've presented a set of real world issues and use cases that should be helpful for anyone working on an open source web store project. Keep in mind that some of your issues go beyond that of a web store and go into the realm of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) which has its own implementation and integration issues.
One thing to keep in mind for your POS systems vs a web store is that with your POS systems someone is most likely going to be at your brick and mortar store if they are going to attempt to tamper with the system. With a web store, everyone with an automated exploit framework is going to be attempting to break into the store to distribute malware and glean any data that could turn a profit. How much information do you REALLY want to have potentially accessible from the Internet? (I'm not trying to make you paranoid, but it's a problem faced by all web stores). A quick summary is I suspect you need to sit down with Joe, show him your various processes (IE ordering, handling new inventory, reports) for the POS systems in your brick and mortar stores and show him how you think they should apply to the web business. And then you need to decide if you want the work you hired Joe to do to be submitted for inclusion with Satchmo, or if you want to keep that to yourself. As for your tracking price vs cost. You are correct that satchmo currently lacks any models that track the cost of a product vs its price. But if you are able to track the information in one or more spreadsheets, Joe should be able to create django models that contain the same data fields as the spreadsheet and should be able to add a smidgen of metadata to those models so they can be used to populate. I will grant that the django web interface for such data entry may be ill suited for bulk data entry, but there are other ways to load data. As for stamps.com. Any time you find yourself copying and pasting on a computer, assume you're doing things the hard way. Whatever data you need for producing the labels can be pulled in bulk from django. The trick is finding out what format you need that data in for stamps.com. Again, you're going to have to sit down with Joe and show him how you're using the application, explain how you'd like to improve the process, and let him poke around to see what can be improved. Out of stock items and other reports. Is this the kind of thing where you need to know the moment it happens, or is it the sort of thing that is best sorted through once or twice a day? If the former, Joe has some signals work ahead of him. If the latter, you need to think through what canned reports you need to have run periodically, the format you need them in, and how you need them delivered, and then discuss extending the django project with your satchmo store with those features. As for backorder and pre-order. I would suggest a custom product model to handle these cases and they're probably worth submitting upstream. Problems with thousands of variations. While I can see pagination fixes a symptom of the problem, but I think there is a process problem as well. You have a large number of different products spread across atleast two sites. In my mind you need to keep atleast 3 inventory tables. 1) What you report to the customers on the webstore 2) Inventory from deliveries from suppliers and shipments to customers. 3) Periodic physical inventories of the warehouses. #2 and #3 might actually be done more effectively from your existing POS system if you can automatically export an excel file or a CSV file from your POS system. Then have an automated process to adjust the inventory and report discrepancies. It's probably also worth looking at OpenERP and related projects to see if they have any relevance to your business processes. Shipping from two warehouses. I admit to having no bright ideas on this one. One less than bright idea is to have shipping calculated for all possible source addresses, and quote the highest shipping rate. Then reduce the shipping costs and refund the customer if it shipped from somewhere for less. As for ID Ten T errors with shipping dates. Change 'days' to 'business days' and make a note that both US and Canadian holidays are included. Chris Dukes --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Satchmo users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/satchmo-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
